IT Conversations: McConnell disagrees with Brooks' Law

I'm a big fan of IT Conversations. I dislike listening to the radio because the music and ads are not targeted, so I listen to audio books and podcasts instead. IT Conversations is a collection of mostly techie talks from conferences and interviews.

I listened to an interview of Steve McConnell yesterday. One interesting tid-bit is that he disagrees with Brook's Law that "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." (This is pertinent to our recent Project Mgmt class.) He said that adding people usually doesn't make a project later, but instead the people running project didn't have a good idea of just how late the project was already. So when you add people and the project is still late, it gets blamed on adding more people. He thinks you are better off in most cases adding the people.

I can understand both sides. There is a certain amount of ramp up needed to make someone new to a project productive. If you add several people to the tail end of the project, you usually end up spending a lot of time getting them up to speed and not getting the project done. On the other hand, while you don't get 100% productivity out of new people, you can get a high amount if they are good. You can't overlook this. So adding manpower can make a project later, but if you really understand where you are at in the project AND you bring on good people, you will likely improve delivery.